R112Palada Payasam, Rebuilt
Rice ada in reduced milk, at a measured 100 millilitres
Recipes › Sweets and Payasam, Honestly
R116
Chakka Pradhaman
Ripe jackfruit pradhaman, sweetened mostly by the fruit
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringThe jaggery falls from around 300 g to 80 g, because 600 g of ripe jackfruit brings roughly 84 g of its own available carbohydrate into the pot. The fruit was always the sweetener here. The jaggery crept up as cooks began using less fruit.
Ripe jackfruit is Kerala's most extravagant fruit and its most seasonal — for six weeks a year it is everywhere and free, and for the rest of the year it exists as chakka varatti, the dark jaggery-set preserve that lets you make this dish in December. Cooked down with coconut milk it turns almost meaty in flavour, a deep resinous sweetness that no other fruit does. This is the pradhaman to make if you are going to make one, because the fruit does most of the work and you can taste it doing it.
Before you start: Oil your hands and your knife before you go near a jackfruit. The latex is genuinely difficult to remove and it will glue your fingers to the handle. Coconut oil takes it off; soap does not.
Chakka Pradhaman
Active 35 minutes Total 1 hour 15 minutes
Scale
10 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓600 g ripe jackfruit bulbs (about 1.1 kg whole fruit), seeds removed
- ✓300 ml water
- ✓80 g jaggery, preferably dark palm jaggery, broken up
- ✓60 ml water, for melting the jaggery
- ✓8 g (2 tsp) ghee
- ✓15 g fresh coconut, in thin 5 mm slices
- ✓300 ml second coconut milk (randaam paal, M08)
- ✓200 ml first coconut milk (onnaam paal, M08)
- ✓2 g (½ tsp) cardamom, seeds only, crushed
- ✓1 g (¼ tsp) dry ginger powder
- ✓a pinch of salt
Allergens: Milk.
Equipment: Heavy pan of at least 4 litres, or an uruli; a mixie or blender; a fine sieve for the jaggery; a 100 ml ladle. Substitute: mash the cooked jackfruit with a potato masher instead of blending, which gives a coarser, more fibrous pradhaman that several households prefer and which keeps more of the fruit's structure.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Oil your hands and knife. Halve the bulbs, pull out the seeds, and reserve the seeds for another dish.
- Chop the bulbs roughly and simmer them in the 300 ml of water, covered, until completely soft and collapsing, . The kitchen will smell strongly of jackfruit, which some people love and some do not, and there is no middle ground.
- Blend the cooked fruit and its liquid to a coarse purée — not smooth. You want to see fibre. 15–20 seconds in a mixie is plenty.
- Melt the jaggery with the 60 ml water, , and strain it into the pan with the purée.
- Cook the purée and jaggery together over a medium heat, stirring across the base constantly in the last few minutes, until the mixture darkens to a deep amber-brown, thickens, and pulls away from the sides of the pan when you draw the spoon through it, . This stage is where the flavour is made and where the pan catches if you leave it. It should smell of caramel and resin.
- Fry the coconut slices in the ghee in a separate small pan until golden at the edges, , and set aside.
- Add the second coconut milk, stirring, and bring to a bare simmer for until uniform and glossy.
- Take the pan off the heat, wait 30 seconds, then swirl in the first coconut milk, the cardamom, the dry ginger and the salt. Do not return it to the heat.
- Scatter the fried coconut over and portion with the 100 ml ladle at the pan.
Why this worksRipe jackfruit brings 14.01 g of available carbohydrate and 3.62 g of fibre per 100 g, most of that carbohydrate as free sugars, plus a set of resinous esters that read as intensely sweet even where sugar is absent. Reducing the purée before the coconut milk goes in concentrates those aromatics and drives some Maillard browning against the fruit's own protein, which is why the finished dish tastes of far more sugar than it contains.
Sourcing note
Ripe jackfruit is sold whole in season and, far more practically, as ready-cleaned bulbs in trays or frozen packets in Asian groceries year-round — frozen ripe jackfruit works completely and is what most readers should use, thawed and drained. Read the label on tins with real care. Tinned jackfruit in syrup is ripe fruit packed in added sugar, and if you use it you must drop the jaggery to about 30 g and rinse the fruit. Tinned jackfruit in brine is tender green jackfruit and it is a vegetable — it will not sweeten anything and it does not belong in this recipe. Chakka varatti, the jaggery-set jackfruit preserve, is the traditional out-of-season route: use 300 g of varatti in place of the fruit and all the jaggery, since the preserve already contains it. Jackfruit seeds are the best part of the fruit nutritionally and are almost always thrown away — 5.79 g protein and 8.63 g fibre per 100 g. Boil them, peel them, and put them in a thoran.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 17 g of net carbohydrate a bowl, of which about 8 g is added jaggery and the rest is fruit sugar arriving with 3 g of fibre. That is the best profile of any sweet in this chapter, and it is still 17 g of net carbohydrate.
Blood pressure: 30 mg sodium. Note that jackfruit is a genuinely potassium-rich food, which for most readers is useful — but if you have chronic kidney disease, or take an ACE inhibitor, an angiotensin receptor blocker, a potassium-sparing diuretic or a potassium supplement, raising potassium intake is a conversation for your clinician rather than a general recommendation, and the same carve-out applies here as to M07.
Cholesterol: 7 g of saturated fat a bowl, all coconut milk. Skipping the first milk and using 400 ml of second takes it to about 4 g, and this dish carries that reduction better than R113 does because the fruit purée supplies body.
Swap it
Fresh ripe jackfruit → frozen ripe jackfruit, same weight, thawed and drained. Effectively no loss.
Fresh fruit → 300 g chakka varatti and no jaggery at all. Darker, denser, more concentrated; this is the correct out-of-season version.
Tinned in syrup → 600 g drained and rinsed, and cut the jaggery to 30 g. Sweeter and flatter, with less of the resinous note.
Jaggery → cane jaggery or panela, 1:1.
Ghee → coconut oil for a vegan version, 1:1.
Ripe jackfruit → very ripe nendran banana, 600 g, which makes pazham pradhaman. Sweeter and softer, with a shorter reduction, 10–12 minutes; ripe nendran carries 24.95 g of available carbohydrate per 100 g against jackfruit's 14.01, so drop the jaggery to 50 g.
Scale it
At 25 servings and above, do the fruit reduction in two pans. A deep single pot of jackfruit purée spits, catches and takes nearly twice as long, because the evaporating surface is what limits it.
Make ahead · store · freeze
The reduced fruit-and-jaggery base (end of step 5) keeps fridge 5 days and freezes 6 months — it is essentially chakka varatti, and making a large batch in season is the traditional and correct thing to do. Finished pradhaman keeps fridge 3 days. Freeze 2 months before the first milk goes in. Reheat gently, never at a simmer.
Leftovers
Thick leftover chakka pradhaman is the filling for R115 Elayada, for a chakka ada, or spread thinly on a dosa. It also does something very good stirred at one part to four into thick curd with a pinch of salt.
Troubleshooting
Bitter, with a burnt edge: the purée caught at step 5. Pour off without scraping and taste. Jackfruit purée is thick and catches faster than a milk or dal base.
Sticky, stringy, glue-like: over-blended. Fifteen seconds, coarse. The fibre is meant to be visible.
Tastes of jaggery rather than of jackfruit: the fruit was underripe, or you used tinned fruit in syrup without cutting the jaggery. Underripe jackfruit brings little sweetness and no resin, and there is nothing to do but add fruit.
Split and oily: the first milk boiled.
Hands glued together: jackfruit latex. Rub with coconut oil, then wash. Oil the knife before the next fruit.
Serve with
As one of the two sadya payasams, alongside R112 or R120 · R119 the sadya pickle set afterwards · R111 Sulaimani · M08 coconut milk, three extractions
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